The journal policies embody a commitment to maintaining the highest standards of academic and ethical excellence in scholarly publishing. These policies provide a comprehensive framework to ensure integrity, fairness, and transparency across all stages of the publication process. From guidelines on publication and post-publication ethics to addressing copyright matters and conflict of interest, these policies safeguard the interests of authors, reviewers, editors, and readers alike. By adhering to these standards, the journal fosters a collaborative environment that supports rigorous peer review, unbiased decision-making, and the responsible dissemination of knowledge. Please refer to the details below for an in-depth understanding of each policy.

Upon receive of an article, Editor-in-Chief should evaluate the merit of a manuscript as soon as it is received. An acknowledgement with a reference number must be sent to the Authors once the manuscript is received. Rejection straight away may due to out of the journal’s scope, insufficient general interest and inappropriate contents. Only manuscript deemed to be in good order and seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent to Section Editor for appointment of reviewers without delay.

The Editor-in-Chief together with the Section Editor have to provide the Authors with an explanation of the editorial decision on a manuscript. Editor-in-Chief should write high-quality editorial letters that integrate reviewers’ comments and offer additional suggestions to the Author.

All manuscripts submitted to The Journal undergo a rigid double-blind review process including those received from the Editorial Board members. In addition, when making editorial decisions about peer reviewed articles where an editor is an Author or is acknowledged as a contributor, The Journal will ensure that the affected editors exclude themselves from the publication process including the review process and decision on the manuscript. Although editors are allowed to submit manuscript to The Journal, too many submissions from the Journal’s own Editorial Board are not allowed.

When editors are presented with manuscript where their own interests may influence their ability to make an unbiased editorial decision, they should hand over the handling of the manuscript to a suitably qualified editor in the board. The Editorial Board will appoint a suitable member to handle the manuscripts objectively, fairly and professionally free of personal biases that may affect his/her judgments.

The Journal’s Editorial Board has the sole responsibility and authority to determine the proper sanction. Plagiarism is a scientific misconduct and is an unacceptable violation of publication ethics. The Journal takes scientific misconduct seriously and will be dealt with promptly and fairly. The Editors-in-Chief, Editorial Boards, and the Reviewers are the primary means of detecting plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to The Journal. Given the serious nature of a charge of plagiarism, it is required that confidentiality be maintained throughout the process. The charge of plagiarism, supporting materials and outcome are only to be made known to those persons who are involved in the review process. Due process and confidentiality are important in all cases of alleged plagiarism, falsification and other unethical conduct. Such cases will be handled according to the Publication Code of Ethics of the Editorial Board.

In cases where the Editorial Board determined that an unethical conduct occurred, the manuscript will be rejected. If the article has been published, it will be retracted promptly. The Authors may be barred from submitting to The Journal for a period of time (one to two years) depending on the nature of the misconduct. The Journal reserves the right to evaluate issues of misconduct such as plagiarism and redundancy, on a case-by-case basis.

Consequences to the Authors

Any work in the manuscript that has been proven to contain any form of plagiarism, falsification, fabrications, or omission of significant material constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. Section Editor and/or reviewers shall report cases of suspected unethical publishing behaviour of the Author(s) to the attention of the Editor-in-Chief who shall ensure an appropriate action and subsequently bring it to The Journal’s Editorial Board for a suitable action below depending upon the severity of the case:

• Notice to the Author(s) involved,

• Rejection of the manuscript,

• Retraction of article that has been published with appropriate notice in the website and the following hardcopy issue of The Journal

• Ban from submission to The Journal for a period of time, normally up to 2 years.

• Informing the Authors’ institution of the unethical conduct for their further actions.

Consequences to the Editorial Board Members

Journal reputation depends heavily on the conduct and fairness of its Board members. The Editorial Board members shall demonstrate their dedicated efforts to this effect at all times. Complainants shall bring cases of suspected members’ misconduct to the attention of the Editor-in-Chief who shall ensure that the relevant documentation substantiating an unacceptable violation of publication ethics is made available to the Journal’s Editorial Board for a suitable action. Any member who holds an editorial office at The Journal with proven unethical conducts will be dismissed from that office. Additionally, penalties would typically include the sanctions as in the case of Authors found guilty.

The International Medical Research Journal (IMRJ) is the official journal of the Institute for Medical Research, Ministry of Health Malaysia. The Journal wish to select and publish, through double-blind peer-review, quality articles on all aspects of biomedical research. The Journal welcomes articles of interest in the form of original papers, reviews and case studies. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the Institute for Medical Research. The Journal is distributed free to selected managers of the Ministry of Health, medical libraries and principal author of published articles.

The editorial board will make the utmost effort to make sure that the peer-review and publication process is thorough, objective and fair. A guideline on The Journal publication code of ethics largely based upon the principles upheld by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE outlines standards for good behaviour and solutions to ethical issues faced by Authors, Editors and Reviewers. The Journal publication code of ethics has been designed to safeguard the integrity of the journal and to ascertain all published materials are of the highest scientific and ethical standard. Authors, Editors and Reviewers can use these guidelines when discharging their task and duties. Any ethical issue and question, which concerns The Journal, can be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief. These policy and code of ethics applies to manuscripts submitted to The Journal and The Editorial Board revises them from time to time.

Amendments. Changes can be requested by the Authors of the publication due to a variety of reason. These amendments may fall into one of four categories as below:

• Erratum is the notification of an important error made by The Journal during production of the article that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the article, or the reputation of the Authors, or of The Journal

• Corrigendum is the notification of an important error made by the Author(s) that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the article, or the reputation of the Authors or the journal. All Authors must sign corrigenda submitted for publication

• Retraction is the notification of invalid results. All Co-Authors must sign a retraction specifying the error and stating briefly how the conclusions are affected, and submit it for publication. Retractions are judged according to whether the main conclusion of the article no longer holds or is seriously undermined as a result of subsequent information coming to light of which the Authors were not aware at the time of publication.

• Addendum is the notification of a peer-reviewed addition of information to an article, usually in response to readers’ request for clarification.

Readers who wish to draw attention to published work requiring retraction should write to The Editor-in-Chief who will seek advice from reviewers if they judge that the information is likely to draw into question the main conclusions of the published article. The author of the article will be given a chance to give an explanation regarding the query.

• Institute for Medical Research, Ministry of Health Malaysia holds the copyright as the publisher to all published articles in The Journal and this includes the rights to reproduce all or part of the publication.

• The reproduction of articles or illustrations without prior consent from IMRJ is prohibited.

• All articles published in IMRJ are available under open access and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0).

• Authors transfer the copyright to IMRJ, which ensures the protection of the author's work, while still allowing them to retain their proprietary rights.

• The copyright transfer grants IMRJ exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article, including in reprints, photographic formats, microfilm, translations, and other similar forms of reproduction.

• Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from the copyright holder for any materials they wish to use that are protected by copyright.

The works are made available under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of articles published in IMRJ and to use them for any lawful purposes.

• IMRJ is an open-access journal.

• All articles are freely available to read, share, and download.

• Following publication ethics and best practices of scholarly publishing, authors, and journals must be properly credited.

• All articles are accessible via IMRJ’s website and selected indexing and abstracting databases.

• Manuscript must be written and submitted in English.

• Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all Authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or any other language, without the written consent of the Penerbit IMRJ.

• All new submissions of manuscripts should be submitted through the online submission system, Open Journal Systems (OJS), created by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and released under the GNU General Public License. For first-time users, authors are required to register at https://imrj.nih.gov.my/ and create accounts for manuscript submission and future access. This online submission system will streamline the review process as well as the final decision process.

• Licensing

  All articles published in IMRJ are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  The authors are free to:

  • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.

  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

  Under the following terms:

  • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

  • No additional restrictions — The author may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits

• The work is the author’s own and there are no falsifications or fabrication of data. Plagiarism includes duplicate publication of the author’s work without proper citation. Authors are expected to use plagiarism checker software and ensure proper citation of all sources and are required to submit a plagiarism report during manuscript submission and the similarity index should be less than 20%. If clear plagiarism is identified (≥ 20%), the article will be rejected. Authors must cite others’ work and ideas explicitly, even if the work or ideas are not quoted exactly or being paraphrased. This applies to previous work published or unpublished in any form.

  Self-plagiarism (or “redundancy”) includes reusing portions of previous writings by using identical or nearly identical sentences or paragraphs from earlier writings in research manuscripts, without quotation or acknowledgement. Authoring several manuscripts that are slightly modified from each other and submitted for publication in different journals without acknowledgement of the other manuscript/articles is also a form of self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism can be minimised or avoided by citing Author’s previous publications where appropriate.

  Other Forms of plagiarism:

  • Claiming other’s paper as the Author’s own paper; using or paraphrasing substantial parts of other’s paper without proper credit;

  • Claiming results from research of others as Authors’ own;

  • Use of other published and unpublished ideas or words or intellectual property without proper citation and permission, and claiming them as an original idea rather than derived from an existing source. This applies to ideas or words taken from any published or unpublished materials including abstracts, proceedings, grant applications, journal articles, books or any other publication format.

  Plagiarism is a misconduct and unacceptable publishing behaviour that may lead to serious consequences to the Authors. In order to avoid plagiarism Authors should:

  • keep all records of the source of information,

  • put quotation marks for any phrase that are used in verbatim and cite the source, use their own words when summarizing or paraphrasing someone else’s paragraphs together with a proper citation, and

  • cite all sources as much as possible when writing a manuscript

  • give proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given

  • cite publications that have been influential in determining the reported work